Is Social Media Just a Time Suck for Small Business, Real Estate Agents & Mortgage Brokers?

Social media time management is an ever-evolving environment. New tools are coming out every day, and it can be hard to keep up. Furthermore, many of us, including myself, have wondered whether all the hard work will pay off. Bottom line: Leveraging social media correctly in conjunction with the rest of your marketing/business plan will increase your revenue; I saw my income increase exponentially! I will give you five tested tips and tools that will help you efficiently manage your social media.

But first just a few stats for those data-driven agents out there:

• 50 percent of small-business owners reported getting new customers from social media. (CrowdSpring)
• Nearly 80 percent of active Internet users visit social networks and blogs. (Nielsen)
• 91 percent of online American adults (approx. 129 million) access some form of social media each month. (Experian)
• According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant McKinsey Global Institute, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value.

Now, on to the goodies.

1) You must be an “iAgent” — and by that I mean, an agent of the Internet. Mobility is key. You need to be able to work from anywhere from your “virtual office.” Whether it be on your laptop, smartphone or tablet, you must be on one of them. The operating system is your choice: Droid or iPhone or Blackberry. All have App stores where you can find Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.

2) Dashboards. Having all your accounts in one place really is a time saver. I use HootSuite and simply love it! I manage many of my accounts from this one platform (desktop and mobile). There are also others out there like TweetDeck, CoTweet, and Seesmic.

Now, if a dashboard is too overwhelming, try connecting some of your accounts together. For instance, you can use Facebook Connect to connect your Twitter account to your Facebook profile so when you post to Facebook, your posts will feed automatically to your Twitter stream.

And vice versa, you can go into your Twitter account and connect your Facebook profile. INSIDER TIP: Create a personalized #hashtag so you can build an audience around a specific theme, event or discussion topic, and then add that stream to your dashboard.

3) Create a posts bin. It is a very simple tool that many agents don’t think about. When you come across good content to share, save it for later in the posts bin. So, if you have writer’s block or have been busy with customers, you will have ready-made content.

4) Integrate a social media daily checklist. Go here for a great one (and free) viaHubSpot to download and personalize. Simple, easy and efficient.

5) Take advantage of alerts apps and tools that go straight to your phone and/or email. Depending on your preference, set them up for daily or weekly timing. My favorites are TweetAlarm, TweetBeep, Facebook Page Weekly Insights Alerts, Repinly, Pinterest Weekly, and Unroll.me.

I hope these tips and tools help you. No more time “suckage” for you and if you need a little help, email us for a free consultation. maria@internet-marketinginabox.com

Why Every Business Should Use Facebook

By LEE AASE | 

As I previously mentioned, I had an opportunity a couple of weeks ago to distill my thoughts on the business benefits of Facebook for an article Julie Sartain was writing for Computerworld. It was a really useful exercise for me, and an opportunity to encapsulate what I’ve learned in the 10 months or so since I first wrote about Facebook Business Uses.

You can find many of these thoughts expressed, described and demonstrated in more detail in posts linked to SMUG’s Facebook Business page, in its Facebook category or in the formal Facebook curriculum, but I’m posting my full essay here.

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From telephones on each salesperson’s desk to fax machines in every work unit to the hundreds of millions of workplace personal computers connected to the Internet, U.S. business leaders have invested incalculable billions of dollars over the last several decades to connect their employees with the outside world and with each other.

They’ve justified these investments because of increased productivity and greater organizational agility. In 1990, for example, being able to receive customer purchase orders by fax instead of via FedEx or local courier was a huge advance, well worth several hundred dollars for the device purchase and the monthly charges for the requisite extra phone line.

And if AT&T had offered its business customers a free fax machine and dedicated phone line, can you imagine anyone declining?

Social networking sites like Facebook are a much more profound communications phenomenon than the fax, and Facebook’s functionality far surpasses the transmission of black-and-white document images. Yet not only are many businesses failing to take advantage of the free communication services Facebook provides: some actively block their employees from accessing it from their workstations.

What’s wrong with this facsimile? Can you even conceive that business owners and managers would not only reject the mythical free fax offering, but would call security to have the AT&T representative escorted from the premises?

Many managers misperceive Facebook, and therefore fail to appreciate its benefits. I’ve listed some practical Facebook business uses below. While every category won’t apply to every business, if you can’t find some way to profitably leverage a free communications network that has more than 70 million active members, your main business problem is likely lack of creative thinking and vision.

Here are five free Facebook business uses you should consider, plus a low-cost bonus:

Directory Listing: You can establish a free “fan” page for your business or organization in Facebook, complete with links to your Web site, photos, videos and contact information to key employees or salespeople. It’s like a supercharged multimedia white pages listing in a telephone directory. Here’s the Mayo Clinic Facebook fan page.

Word-of-Mouth Catalyst: When people become a “fan” of your organization, or when they write on your wall, it shows up on their Facebook profile and in their friends’ news feeds.

Collaboration Networks: Facebook allows you to form an unlimited number of free groups. They can be open to anyone, closed (you must invite or approve new members) or even secret (their existence doesn’t show up on your profile.) The latter two types could enable your employees to collaborate with each other and with external vendors or agencies, without providing them VPN access behind your corporate firewall.

Free Intranet: Speaking of corporate firewalls, if you run a small business, Facebook could be your intranet, through a secret or closed group. You can post important updates from leadership, invite discussion and even use Facebook Chat for instant messaging, without any expense or IT support. Each work team or unit within your company could have its own secret Facebook group for collaboration.

What about data security? Let’s face it: you probably have a hard enough time getting your employees to pay attention to your corporate priorities. Do you really think it’s likely your competitors will A) Find out that you have a secret Facebook group, B) Have the technical sophistication to engage in strategic espionage, and C) Effectively share the information from your secret group with their employees to put you at a significant competitive disadvantage?

Don’t use Facebook to store your bank account or credit card numbers or other information that could have serious legal ramifications if released, but understand this: most of your corporate information just isn’t all that interesting.

Focus Groups: Groups also let you invite current or potential customers or clients to interact with you and share feedback on your products and services. You can bring them together without travel expense or schedule coordination, and your group can be much larger than what can be managed behind the one-way mirror of a focus group.

The Non-Free Bonus: With 85 percent of college students having profiles, Facebook ads could be a great tool for employee recruitment. You can target pay-per-click ads to students at particular schools, with specific college majors and to undergrads or those who already have their degrees, with a link to a Facebook group or your recruiting site. The extra bonus is that by showing openness to social tools like Facebook that are part of how today’s students interact, you’re more likely to be perceived as a desirable place to work.

I’m not advocating diving into Facebook without first thinking exactly what you hope to accomplish, and whether Facebook is the right fit. But given its power (and the new privacy settings, demonstrated in Facebook 210, which enable separation of personal and professional networking), the burden of proof in the discussion should be on those who oppose its use.

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What do you think? What other practical uses for Facebook have you found? I’d love to hear your stories. And if you disagree with anything I’ve said, I’d be glad to hear your reasons.

The Reframing Matrix - Creativity tools from MindTools.com

The Reframing Matrix - Creativity tools from MindTools.com

A Reframing Matrix is a simple technique that helps you to look at business problems from a number of different viewpoints. It expands the range of creative solutions that you can generate.

Things look different when you change perspective.

© iStockphoto

The approach relies on the fact that different people with different experience approach problems in different ways. What this technique helps you to do is to put yourself into the minds of different people and imagine the solutions they would come up with.

We do this by putting the question to be asked in the middle of a grid. We use boxes around the grid for the different perspectives. This is just an easy way of laying the problem out, so if it does not suit you, change it.
We will look at two different approaches to the reframing matrix – you could, however, use this approach in many different ways.

The 4 Ps Approach

This relies on looking at a problem from different perspectives within a business. The 4 Ps approach looks at problems from the following viewpoints:

• Product perspective: Is there something wrong with the product?
• Planning perspective: Are our business plans or marketing plans at fault?
• Potential perspective: If we were to seriously increase our targets, how would we achieve these increases?
• People perspective: Why do people choose one product over another?

An example of this approach is shown below:

The 'Professions Approach'

Another approach to using a reframing matrix is to look at the problem from the viewpoints of different specialists. The way, for example, that a doctor looks at a problem would be different from the approach a civil engineer would use. This would be different from a sales manager's perspective.
The idea of the Reframing Matrix was devised by Michael Morgan in his book 'Creating Workforce Innovation '.